GDC: What do I think of Microsoft’s announcements, PC Gaming Alliance?

The Gears of War 2 announcement was expected and it turned out to be true. The fact that they put a ship date on it for November, 2008, is also critical. The company needs to have big hits. They have a dwindling number of internal studios to deliver the exclusives. But Gears is big. They better deliver on time. Shane Kim, head of Microsoft Game Studios, said to me that it is noteworthy that they won’t have to recreate a new engine. It will use Unreal Engine 3. Tried and battle tested. By coming up with Gears 2 quickly, Microsoft has a chance to give the other guys a one-two punch. Last year, it dominated the game scene with Halo 3. This year, it has a chance to do the same with Gears 2. The other guys have to answer it. In that sense, Kim wasn’t kidding when he said he had a loaded pipeline of good games coming. Did they show me the money on that promise? Not bad, but I want to hear about more new brand new intellectual property.

The other new Microsoft titles coming also look good. They didn’t show anything today but Grand Theft Auto IV ships (same day as PS 3 version) on April 29. Ninja Gaiden II, which looks good but really is more of the same, ships on June 3. Too Human, Splinter Cell Conviction, and Halo Wars are coming this fall. Lost Odyssey is finally out. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and Army of Two are out next month. I suppose you could say that’s a good line-up. Nintendo and Sony also have solid games lined up. Microsoft says it will have more than 1,000 games on its platform by the fall and Kim says there are more to be unveiled. I hope he still has a lot of gunpowder. Lord knows, if Microsoft buys Yahoo!, he won’t have a lot of money to go buying lots of game developers and publishers.

The announced games are all going to be great. But I’m already salivating on what the next-generation Unreal engine will deliver in the far future. The graphics experience is getting better and better. Destructible environments! For all of the dedication to the Xbox 360, there wasn’t much talk about Games for Windows or the PC.

Yesterday at an evening reception, the PC Gaming Alliance which I had a scoop on last week made its debut. This is way overdue. A little late. But they’re going to tackle some key issues that stand in the way of PC gaming. First, they want to measure just how big it is, says Ned Finkle, vice president of strategic marketing at Nvidia. If the numbers for things such as ad-based games, subscription games, and other business models show that PC gaming is healthy, developers will be drawn to it, he said.

Randy Stude, president of the PCGA and an Intel executive, also said that the alliance will tackle one of the worst problems. Right now, the top games have a wildly different set of minimum requirements. As much as possible they will try to standardize that so that game companies can have a standard target to target.

The member companies include PC hardware manufacturers Acer-Gateway, Dell-Alienware, Intel, Nvidia, and Advanced Micro Devices. Others include PC game peripheral company Razer USA, game developer Epic Games and Activision. More are coming, Stude says. I hope they can get their act together. The goals at the moment seem rather modest, give the PC gaming industry’s problems in the face of outstanding console sales.